Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do. The navy announced Monday that it asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gays and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers. Commodore Paul Docherty, director of...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has suspended bilateral military co-operation with Russia that is not subject to treaty obligations, Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday, responding to Russian moves to annex Ukraine's Crimea region. Hague said this included cancelling a planned French-Russian-UK-United States naval exercise and suspending a proposed Royal Navy ship visit to St Petersburg. Hague also said Britain would be pushing for the strongest possible...

The Duke and Duchess of York, better known as Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, returned to their regular jobs Tuesday after a seven-week honeymoon. Andrew, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, started an 18-week helicopter warfare instructors` course at an air station in southwestern England. His wife returned to her graphic arts job for a publishing firm. instead of commuting she is working in an office in Buckingham Palace.

BOMBER STOPPED: Lebanese troops shot and killed a would-be suicide bomber near Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, a senior military official said. The official said the Palestinian man wearing an explosive belt had approached an army checkpoint just outside the Ein el-Hilweh camp on the outskirts of the southern city of Sidon. PRINCELY DUTY: Prince William, Britain's second in line to the throne, is heading to the Caribbean as part of a two-month deployment in the Royal Navy despite his request to be as close...

Your editorial of May 22, "U.S. allies should share Gulf risk," compels me to comment that the Royal Navy, two of whose brave ships are moored at Navy Pier as an earnest symbol of the major British contribution to Western defense as well as in tribute to Chicago on her 150th birthday, also provides other brave ships which patrol in the Persian Gulf to protect shipping and oil supply lines there. The Armilla patrol of two frigates has been continuously deployed in the Indian Ocean for some...

Prince Harry is now in Afghanistan, continuing a recent tradition of military service among the British royal family. Prince William graduated from the elite Sandhurst military school, as did his younger brother Harry, but has not been considered for a combat role. In January, he began flying lessons with the Royal Air Force. Prince Charles, William and Harry's father, served in the RAF and the Royal Navy in the 1970s, and commanded the minesweeper HMS Bronington. Prince Andrew, Harry...

BOMBER STOPPED: Lebanese troops shot and killed a would-be suicide bomber near Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, a senior military official said. The official said the Palestinian man wearing an explosive belt had approached an army checkpoint just outside the Ein el-Hilweh camp on the outskirts of the southern city of Sidon. PRINCELY DUTY: Prince William, Britain's second in line to the throne, is heading to the Caribbean as part of a two-month deployment in the Royal Navy despite his request to be as close...

Judge's secret Da Vinci code cracked! Reporter's job saved! Admiral of the fleet honored! But who got there first? A London lawyer and a reporter for the Times newspaper both claimed credit Friday for deciphering the coded message hidden in a judge's recent ruling in the copyright case over "The Da Vinci Code." Dan Tench, the lawyer, was the first to notice the odd sequence of 42 boldface italicized letters interspersed throughout the 71-page text of Judge Peter Smith's ruling.

Prince Harry is now in Afghanistan, continuing a recent tradition of military service among the British royal family. Prince William graduated from the elite Sandhurst military school, as did his younger brother Harry, but has not been considered for a combat role. In January, he began flying lessons with the Royal Air Force. Prince Charles, William and Harry's father, served in the RAF and the Royal Navy in the 1970s, and commanded the minesweeper HMS Bronington. Prince Andrew, Harry...

A young British sailor in the summer of 1943 was sightseeing atop the Empire State Building, trying to spot the nearby landmark Woolworth Building when he noticed the shoes worn by a young woman standing nearby. They were tan and open-toed. "I had never seen shoes like that before," he remembered 63 years later, "and when I looked up, I liked the face I saw even better." He was Oswald Maurice Parkin, a British Royal Navy recruit enjoying a few days' respite from dangerous duty on ship convoys...

Edward G. "Ted" Young, 68, of Lisbon Falls, Maine, an architectural decorator and design engineer, formerly of Chicago, died Monday in his home of cancer. He was an architectural decorator in London. A native of London, he graduated from the Stockwell Schools in London, and was in the Royal Navy. In 1953 he moved to Ottawa, where he began a career as a design engineer. He moved to the United States in 1967, and became a U.S. citizen in ceremonies in Chicago in 1976. He was a drum major with the Medinah...

By Matthew Price, a journalist and critic based in Brooklyn, New York | April 17, 2005

Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika By Giles Foden Knopf, 241 pages, $24 The last few years have been a remarkable time for the study of the World War I, bringing us several works that stress the global dimension of the conflict. Historians like Hew Strachan, author of the superlative "The First World War: To Arms," the first installment of a massive, three-volume account, remind us that combat stretched far beyond the muddy...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has suspended bilateral military co-operation with Russia that is not subject to treaty obligations, Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday, responding to Russian moves to annex Ukraine's Crimea region. Hague said this included cancelling a planned French-Russian-UK-United States naval exercise and suspending a proposed Royal Navy ship visit to St Petersburg. Hague also said Britain would be pushing for the strongest possible...

Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do. The navy announced Monday that it asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gays and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers. Commodore Paul Docherty, director of...

"Our friends the Americans will be extremely pleased with this," British Defense Minister George Younger remarked in announcing that the Royal Navy will be dispatching four minesweepers to the Persian Gulf region. Dead right, Mr. Younger. And Americans will be pleased, too, that France also has decided now to add two minesweepers to the naval task force it has deployed to the Gulf. To the considerable embarrassment of the Reagan administration and to the annoyance of many Americans, both...

Coalition divers set small charges next to "minelike" objects off this southern port city Thursday as food aid desperately needed by Iraqi civilians waited offshore for U.S., British and Australian forces to clear the channel and harbor of suspected mines. Sporadic sniper and mortar fire in the town around the port of Umm Qasr has hampered efforts to clear mines from the shallow waters, delaying entry of a British humanitarian ship, the RFA Sir Galahad, for the sixth straight day. "We're in...

The cottage industry that has grown up around the works of novelist Patrick O'Brian continues apace, even though the master nautical novelist who inspired this devotion to the Royal Navy of Nelson's time died last year. A couple of recent non-fiction books return to the source, the history on which O'Brian based his novels, to fill the void left by his death. Glyn Williams' "The Prize of All the Oceans" (Viking, 264 pages, $27.95) is a somewhat dry retelling of the...

Traditionalists are thumbing their noses at a recent decision by the bible of the British shipping industry, a 268-year-old newspaper called Lloyd's List, to stop calling any ship a "she," opting instead for the gender-neutral "it." While the London-based daily considers the change a way to keep up with modern times, the British navy and Maritime Museum say they will continue to honor seafaring tradition. "Lloyd's List can do what it wants. The Royal Navy will continue to call its...

A Royal Navy helicopter plucked an injured polar explorer Friday from a blizzard-swept ridge in Antarctica, where he and a colleague had been stranded five days with only a tiny tent for protection. A Wasp helicopter from the British survey ship Endurance spotted the injured man, Lt. Cmdr. Clive Waghorn of the Royal Navy, and army Lance Cpl. Terry Gill at their tent 3,500 feet up a mountain on Brabant Island, one of the most inhospitable places in the world. The Wasp...

The cottage industry that has grown up around the works of novelist Patrick O'Brian continues apace, even though the master nautical novelist who inspired this devotion to the Royal Navy of Nelson's time died last year. A couple of recent non-fiction books return to the source, the history on which O'Brian based his novels, to fill the void left by his death. Glyn Williams' "The Prize of All the Oceans" (Viking, 264 pages, $27.95) is a somewhat dry retelling of the...